It's the birthday of the boy who inspired the Winnie-the-Pooh books: Christopher Robin Milne, born in 1920 in London, England, the son of the children's writer A.A. Milne. His parents expected a girl and the only name they had picked out was Rosemary, so when they realized they needed to name a boy, they couldn't decide, so each parent chose one.

When Christopher Robin was a year old, he got a teddy bear that he called Edward, and his father took the name "Winnie" from a bear at the London Zoo that Christopher loved. That bear and Christopher's other stuffed toys became the inspiration for the stories his father wrote about Winnie-the-Pooh and friends. But at the same time that A.A. Milne was writing poems and stories about Christopher Robin, the boy was brought up almost completely by a nanny. He was taken downstairs three times a day to visit his parents. He loved to work with his hands — sewing, knitting, dismantling clocks, and rigging up burglar alarms. He took apart and reassembled the lock on his nursery door when he was just seven years old.

Before Christopher Robin started school, he loved to help his father write his stories, but at school his classmates mocked him and recited verses about him from his father's books. Christopher grew to resent his father for making it impossible for him to have a normal life. He went off to the army, and when he returned he felt even more trapped by the fame of being a character in Winnie-the-Pooh, so he decided to leave London and open a bookshop in Dartmouth with his wife, although it attracted lots of customers looking to meet the original Christopher Robin. Eventually, he published three memoirs: The Enchanted Places (1975), Path Through the Trees (1979), and Hollow on the Hill (1982).